DULUTH — You would have thought Ryan Gosling himself had just walked into Paulucci Hall. "Oh my god," cried one woman as she walked through the event space. "Here comes Ken!" Her excitement was understandable.
Right there at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center stood not just a Ken doll, but the original Ken doll — the very first figure to be sold as Barbie's amiable date. Appropriately for the harborside setting, Ken was ready for the beach, wearing a red swimsuit with matching sandals and carrying a yellow towel under his arm. Ken is in Duluth as part of "Barbie: A Cultural Icon," a touring exhibit featuring dozens of dolls and accessories from throughout the toy line's 65-year history.
The exhibit opened Aug. 6 and two days later, the DECC invited fans to a "Pink Party" celebrating the the first-ever museum-style exhibit hosted by the facility. DECC Executive Director Dan Hartman, resplendent in a pink sport coat, was standing in the Symphony Hall mezzanine, where a DJ was playing Miley Cyrus and the party's early attendees were loading up on appetizers.
Museums often have parties to celebrate major exhibit openings, said Hartman, and the DECC event was in that spirit. ADVERTISEMENT "People, I think, are surprised that something like this is here in Duluth, which I think is great. I can't tell you how much effort it took to convince Mattel to actually have it here in Duluth," said Hartman.
"It (is traveling) from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Duluth to New York City." The descriptor "museum-style" is significant. While the DECC has hosted many exhibits and touring attractions of varying types, the core of the Barbie show is a rare collection of authentic artifacts.
The animatronic dinosaurs of Jurassic Quest are not real dinosaurs (don't tell Brainy Beth I spilled the beans), but the dolls in Paulucci Hall are genuine Barbies. That's a huge deal for fans like Nancy Kee, who came with her husband, Tom, all the way from North Dakota to see the Barbie exhibit. "I'd read about it being in other cities," she told News Tribune digital producer Dan Williamson, "but when I heard it was going to be in Duluth and (Tom) was willing .
.. here we are!" Carmen Latterell, of Duluth, has never forgotten a gesture Mattel made over 20 years ago.
"When I was in China, I was adopting my daughter, and Mattel must have had a list of people that were adopting," she told Williamson as she arrived at the Pink Party with her now-adult daughter, Lily. "They gifted us a Barbie holding an Asian baby ..
. it's just one of my favorite things." That Barbie, which inspired mixed reactions among recipients and has since been discontinued, does not appear in the "Cultural Icon" exhibit.
The exhibit presents Barbie as an avatar of aspiration, often a step ahead of the times. A selection of astronaut Barbies are featured prominently in the show, which notes that Barbie stepped into a spacesuit in 1965 — four years before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Barbie went to space 18 years before the United States first sent a woman into orbit, though the Soviet Union put a female cosmonaut into space in 1963.
ADVERTISEMENT Last year's blockbuster movie proved just how much fascination Barbie still engenders, but the traveling exhibit actually predates the movie. Its portrayal of the doll as someone who can be all things to all women is both celebrated and satirized by Greta Gerwig's sharp-elbowed film, in which both Barbie and Ken emerge from their plastic universe into our world, respectively offended and tempted by the reality of patriarchy. From the beginning, Barbie's appeal has been that she is not a baby doll, but — to use a term coined in the 1960s to market G.
I. Joe dolls — an action figure. She's been a vehicle for kids to act out their adult aspirations, from relationships to career goals to material desires.
One of the signature attractions in the Barbie exhibit is an actual Corvette convertible, refinished to match Barbie and the Rockers' 1985 "Ultra 'Vette." Stepping into the car (all attendees are encouraged to do so) was an experience not unlike sliding into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon on Disney's Smugglers Run ride. As a kid in Duluth in the '80s, I had Kenner's Falcon toy — although Han Solo, awkwardly, had to pilot the ship in his Hoth fur coat or Endor forest fatigues since I didn't have the original Episode IV figure.
My sisters had Barbie's convertible — not the mirrored Rocker model, but a relatively subdued matte pink version like the one Gizmo rides to the rescue in "Gremlins." An 11.5-inch Barbie towered over the 3.
75-inch Han, and could change outfits easily. Which doll was cooler? The mass-produced toys were part of a decades-long tsunami of consumer products marketed directly to children, then as now with the aid of tie-in shows and other media. Child development experts grumbled, but for us and for millions of other kids, the dolls fundamentally delivered on their promise of being props for imaginative play.
Owning the figures as physical objects accorded implied permission to enter a more exciting, adult world. While the "Barbie" movie and other media allow today's adults to revisit their youthful dream worlds onscreen, there's something particularly compelling about seeing those original toys, complete with all their accessories. A small exhibit of original Star Wars toys riveted me when it visited the Science Museum of Minnesota a few years back, and last week it was apparent that people who grew up playing with Barbies were just as awed by the rare collection of dolls now on display at the DECC.
In addition to the Barbie car, other photo opportunities include giant Barbie boxes and a human-size room corner featuring details from the original 1962 Dreamhouse. That first Dreamhouse was more modest than Barbie's later domiciles, such as the 1979 two-story A-frame my sisters played with — not to mention the 1990 pink palace retrospectively described by the New York Times as a "McMansion." ADVERTISEMENT Barbie has also had a McJob, as evidenced by a 1982 burger-flipping Barbie on display right next to an absolutely majestic 1985 astronaut Barbie with glittering pink puffed spacesuit sleeves — though a curious absence of gloves, which even the first astronaut Barbie seemed to understand would be necessary during extravehicular excursions.
Paulucci Hall — a room formerly used for COVID tests — has been tricked out for Barbie with pink-painted doors and other flamboyant touches, including new script signage I hope the DECC keeps in place permanently. Still, it's not a particularly glamorous space, and the arrival of rows of Barbies in evening dress has something akin to the effect you've experienced if you're on the list for those Simon emails that try to convince you cliques of gorgeous models tricked out for Rodeo Drive are actually on their way to shop Black Friday bargains at Miller Hill Mall. That said, it's fitting for Barbie dolls to come to Duluth — and particularly to a venue where they'll constantly be passed by ships bound for destinations across the globe.
For all its snark, the "Barbie" movie finds its emotional core by identifying how the dolls have encouraged kids to see themselves living empowered lives out in the great wide world. Despite Barbie's codependent relationship with gender stereotypes ("math class is tough"), the exhibit prefers to highlight how the dolls have given kids opportunities to play-act as independent women — and how progress has been made, for example, in the recent introduction of Barbies with varying body types. If the toy line's history gets the soft-focus treatment, that's as you might have guessed.
After all, how deeply would you expect an authorized exhibit of G.I. Joe toys to delve into the fetishization of military hardware and the reification of a binary moral universe? DECC visitors can ask tougher questions for themselves, or not, as they stroll through the exhibit and reminisce about how Barbie's story has intersected with their own.
Life in plastic? It's fantastic!.
